Anti-Abortion Group To Robocall 4 Million People This Weekend

The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List announced Friday that it plans to make automated phone calls to 4 million socially conservative voters in 12 swing states this weekend to ask them to vote for Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

The calls will feature the voice of conservative actor and former Senator Fred Thompson talking about President Barack Obama's views on abortion. "I want to take just a few seconds to ask for your vote ... not for me, but for thousands and thousands of children who have not yet been born," Thompson says in the recording. "The fact is that Barack Obama is the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had. If he is reelected, more and more babies will never be born. If you value human life, you need to cast your vote against Barack Obama."

The group will place the calls in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and Wisconsin as part of its final campaign push for Romney.

The group is also going after Hispanic voters in six battleground states with anti-abortion phone messages from Hispanic actor Eduardo Versategui.

“With only four days to go, we are leaving nothing on the table – voters must know this President’s extreme abortion record before casting their vote,” SBA List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement. “In 2004, 22 percent of voters cited ‘moral values’ including abortion as their most important issue, and 80 percent of those supported President Bush, clinching victory in an election that came down to 537 votes in the swing state of Florida. The pro-life issue is a winner, and pro-life voters are capable of securing victory in close elections."

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Eric Fehrnstrom, senior campaign adviser for Mitt Romney, said on Sunday that issues pertaining to women's reproductive rights, such as abortion and birth control, were "shiny objects" meant to distract voters from the real issues.
"Mitt Romney is pro-life," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "He'll govern as a pro-life president, but you're going to see the Democrats use all sorts of shiny objects to distract people's attention from the Obama performance on the economy. This is not a social issue election."

The Senate will vote Thursday on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would expand and strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and make it illegal for employers to punish women for bringing up pay disparity issues.
Dana Perino, a Fox News contributor and former press secretary for President George W. Bush, called the equal pay issue "a distraction" from the country's real financial problems last week.
"Well, it's just yet another distraction of dealing with the major financial issues that the country should be dealing with," Perino said. "This is not a job creator."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose home state's legislature recently defunded Planned Parenthood and voted to pass a bill that would allow employers to deny women birth control coverage, delivered a floor speech in which he insisted that the war on women is something imaginary for Democrats to "sputter about."
"My friends, this supposed 'War on Women' or the use of similarly outlandish rhetoric by partisan operatives has two purposes, and both are purely political in their purpose and effect: The first is to distract citizens from real issues that really matter and the second is to give talking heads something to sputter about when they appear on cable television," he said.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tried to trivialize concerns about the legislative "war on women" by comparing it to a "war on caterpillars."
"If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we'd have problems with caterpillars," Priebus said in an April interview on Bloomberg Television. "It's a fiction."

Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Sarah Steelman (R) took heat from her opponents in May when she contended that Democratic lawmakers' focus on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act was "a distraction" from the issues they should be dealing with instead.
"I think it's unfortunate that the Democrats have made a political football out of this thing, which I think is what they keep doing to distract from real problems that are facing our nation," she said in an interview with St. Louis Public Radio.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) defended the Republican Party in April for going after insurance coverage for contraception by arguing that women don't actually care about contraception.
"Women don't care about contraception," she said on ABC's The View. "They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all those other things."